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In a way, you could sort of see how the mishegas that has gone on between Oracle and Autonomy over the last few days was leading up to some larger purpose. For Oracle, that is. It’s not every day that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison deliberately provokes a very public fight with another company that results in back-and-forth press releases, leaked emails, publication of previously confidential PowerPoint slides and so on.
But apparently it all did lead up to something. For those just tuning in, here’s how it all went down.
About two weeks ago, on Oracle’s quarterly earnings conference call, Ellison was asked by an analyst about Oracle’s position in the market for analyzing and pulling useful intelligence unstructured data — transcripts of videos and contents of emails, and scores of other things that aren’t neatly arranged in databases. It’s kind of a big deal as companies grapple with the so-called “big data” problem, and the question was a natural jumping-off point to discussing Hewlett-Packard’s $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy. Ellison, by way of an answer, portrayed unstructured data as a feature of the existing Oracle database software, and “nothing new,” and then slammed HP for paying too much for Autonomy, the British software firm whose specialty happens to be — you guessed it — unstructured data. And, oh, by the way, Ellison said he took pass on Autonomy when it had been shopped to Oracle because he thought the price was too high. Continue reading
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